I love Netflix. It’s one of the best streaming services out there. They have done so much right with it. However, it is in dire need of changing one thing. The desperately need to add a higher tier to their accounts. I envision it would look something like this.

4 concurrent streams (Nothing new from their UHD tier)

HD and UHD content (Nothing new from their UHD tier)

Every TV show they can get as well as episodes the day after they air

Every Movie they can possibly get

No expiration dates for content

$20-30/mo

I would totally upgrade to this tier and I would think that they would dominate the market if they were able to pull this off.

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Soooo it’s been a while since I’ve somewhat frequently blogged. Back on August 10th, 2015 (the day after our 1 year anniversary), Bea and I found out that we are having a baby! It’s been a long proccess since then filled with excitement, worry, and anxiety. We’ve nicknamed him “Squishy” until he’s born and we reveal his real name.

Squishy was due on April 20th (it’s now 5 days past that!) and can come at any time. I never knew how tiring waiting could be. Every message I get while at work from Bea I’m thinking “Is it time yet??!?!” but naturally it’s not… Squishy has also been quite active and as symptoms of the pending labor progress we’re constantly thinking “Is this it?” but never such luck. We’ve actually started calling him a troll baby… haha!

Anyway, to the point of the title. On the 20th Bea got her induction date all scheduled for the Wednesday the 27th. Longest. Week. Ever! I cannot believe how long this wait has been. We’re hoping he comes before he’s evicted, but it’s looking like he may be too lazy and comfortable to come out on his own…

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We’re gearing up for a new website launch at work. We currently use CodeIgniter, but as the years ago by it’s becoming increasingly clear that CI is becoming stagnant. I have been looking into Laravel and have fallen completely in love with it. With Blade, Eloquent, Composer, Elixir, Namespace support, and Artisan it is clear that Laravel will be the better way to go. From what I hear, Laravel 5.1 will also introduce PSR-2 standards for the engine itself. Sadly, due to time restrictions, we may end up sticking with CI. But in the event that we do move on to Laravel, I am super excited!

If you’ve never used or checked out Laravel and you’re a PHP developer, do check out this Laracasts series! I starts you off with the most recent release and teaches you the basics of all the amazing features of Laravel 5.

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I’m working on a simple button that is supposed to invoke one of my methods while setting a variable from the button. I’ve found 10 ways to do it, and none of them work….. Why do you hate me, VisualForce and Apex?

This looks like it should work! However, it does not. It looks like it’s actually been a bug since at least 2010… Or at least people have had the same issue all the way back then. Anyone know of a work-a-round that actually works? All I need is a button that passes a variable somehow to the controller! It shouldn’t be this hard.

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Wow! It has been quite a year so far. So much is happening and I don’t even think my brain has quite processed one bit of it.

Engaged

So, on April 12th, my then girlfriend flew in to Sacramento to visit me for the weekend and a few days. Upon arrival, I swept her away up to Redding, California to a place called Turtle Bay Exploration Park. There we enjoyed a day at the museum. We learned a lot about the construction of Shasta Dam and got to see a bunch of animals. When we were done there, we walked across the Sundial Bridge to the McConnell Arboretum & Botanical Gardens. We walked around there for a little bit, enjoying the beautiful day that it was.

When we were nearing the end of the walk, Bea got distracted by a bunch of butterflies that were fluttering around some beautiful flowers. I took this opportunity and told her “I think I see something over there, I’ll be right back”. I ran off behind a large bush, pretending to pick something up off the ground while grabbing something from my backpack. I brought this surprise over to Bea and said “Hey hun, look what I found!!” revealing a Minecraft Diamond Ore block. She was totally amazed at what I had supposedly found in the bush. Then I got down on one knee while opening the box exposing a beautiful diamond ring and proposed to her. She was in shock for a few seconds, but quickly recovered saying “Yes!”

The Interview

From August 2013 up until April 2014, I had been applying for jobs in hopes to relocate to the greater Portland area. This is where Bea lives and I grew up in Spokane, WA so I had been wanting to move back to the Pacific North West to escape the heat of Sacramento that I endured for 6.5 long years. After I had proposed, I double-timed my effort in looking for a job. On April 28th, I got a phone interview that went really well… So well, that they wanted me to come in the following Monday for an in-person interview!

The in-person interview, also, seemed to go pretty well. They had me complete a couple tests. One dealing with a hardware issue and the other dealing with creating a newsletter from a Photoshop PSD. I did pretty well, definitely a lot to learn on the newsletter side of things, though. The following week was probably one of the longest weeks ever. Josh, the guy who interviewed me finally called back on Tuesday the 13th to offer me the position!!! I was so excited! I couldn’t believe that all my efforts finally paid off and I was about to move closer to my sweetie!

The Move

I finished my job at Intel on Friday the 23rd and frantically got all my things fully packed and ready to go. On the 24th, I picked up a U-Haul trailer and loaded it up with the help of my mum. Wednesday, I grabbed my cat, who had to stay with my mum due to living situations, and drove off to Vancouver (Not BC), Washington (Not DC) to start my new life! With the trailer, it was about a 14 hour drive, but I finally made it by 8:30pm. On Thursday, I was already moving into my new apartment. My fiance and soon-to-be-Mother-in-Law graciously helped me unload the trailer. I couldn’t have done it without them! It went decently well, though I am definitely hiring people to move me next time! Pulling a muscle in my lower back once is enough for me… After a week and a half it’s still giving me a lot of grief. However, it is getting better pretty fast, so I am very thankful for that.

The New Job

I started my new job on June 2nd and have six days under my belt. I am seriously loving it so far! I cannot believe how blessed I am to have this job. The company, Adair Homes, seems like an excellent company to work for so far. The environment is great and the people are some of the best people to work with. My manager is very easy-going and so far seems like an excellent manager… In fact, we might be becoming friends.

My position is to be Josh’s Information Systems Specialist. That means I do everything from Computer Support to Server Management to web development. So far it has been a blast learning everything I will be responsible for. I cannot wait to see what else this job has in store for me.

Long Story Short

It’s been a crazy year… So far new fiance, new town, and new job. Soon I will add new wife to that! Which will also include a new cat! 2014 has been a year of change for me. So far it’s been and will be change for the better…

I like 2014.

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So, I ended up dropping the ball on this blog again. But I did mostly finish what I wanted to do with the game I was working on in the last couple of posts. I’m not at a point where I want to share it yet as there’s a few tweaks I want to make before I do so. It may take a week or two before I’m able to do so, however. It was a fun and exciting process to learn (again) how to make a simple game in Unity. I would probably go further, but my 3D modeling skills are…. Well… Let’s just say my skills leave a LOT of room for improvement. So much so that I made a game…. with blocks….. Good news is, I made each level out of one mesh in a 3D modeling program rather than hundreds to thousands of blocks!

In the meantime, I’m learning how to encrypt data I place on Google Drive so that “only I” have the rights to view private data I back up on it. I’ve been using a free program called Boxcryptor. The free version has limited features, but it serves it’s purpose well.

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So, I’ve been playing with animations after learning about them in the tutorial series I mentioned in my Return to Unity post. I got the animation to be where I wanted it and set up the objects script to initiate the animation. Code was good, no errors. Animation was good and all attached to the object. Everything should work, right? Wrong. Hit play and triggered the event that should animate my object. Nothing…. So I try it again…. Still nothing… I ended up spending a good 30 min to an hour trying to figure out why my object wasn’t performing the animation. I looked at a ton of different things. Tried different methods of calling the animation in my code.

Nothing seemed to work. Just when I was about to give up I saw what was wrong… Let’s see if you can’t see what the issue was… It’s so dumb. You’ll probably see it in 2 seconds.

Yup. See that unchecked box between the play button image and “Animation”? That means the animation is disabled… Oops.

Long story short, be sure your components are properly enabled before you spend a long time banging your head against your keyboard.

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For the past few months I dropped learning C# and Unity 3D due to how busy I’ve been with work an my personal life. I’m looking to pick it up again a little bit now. In fact, I’ve already started on a few tutorials. Now, I can’t promise I will continue for an extended period of time due to work and personal life… Again… haha.

Anyway, I decided to do something a little more simple than what I was doing before. I had started learning how to make an FPS as well as automated tile-based map creation. Now I’m going through a tutorial that is teaching me how to make a simple block based game. Now this game is really, really simple. But it will be a good, simple game to help me reorient myself into Unity 3D.

So far with what I’ve done in the past and what I’m doing right now I really enjoy programming. I’ve, also, worked with other languages in the past for work and personal reasons. The language I have most experience in would be PHP/MySQL with personal websites and services. At work I’ve been learning C++ with the Arduino Microcontroller for automated validation purposes and have really enjoyed working with it.

Anyway, I’ll hopefully be updating the blog more with what I learn as I learn it. Hope you all enjoy!